All About My Mother? Well, hardly. More like bits and bobs - with some boobs and dangly bits. This is the first time Pedro Almodovar has given permission for an English stage version of his 1999 film. What he's got in return is less than full-on passion; more like an on-off affair.

There's an argument going round that adapting movies for the theatre is always a putrid notion. Marcel Berlins put this view in the Guardian a few days ago, where he rightly said that such versions are often a lazy cashing-in on a film's success, but also declared that, while the Old Vic shouldn't 'take a great work of art and mangle it' (he hasn't seen the production), he didn't mind plays being turned into films. This is to diss both art forms: to treat theatre as if it were some semi-evolved species on the way to becoming celluloid, and to condescend to movies; if it's lazy for theatre to adapt, why is it all right for film? Actually, an inventive translation from screen to stage makes something new, as Kneehigh's recent A Matter of Life and Death proved. There aren't many such, not because of presumption on the part of directors ('How dare they...' says Berlins), but because of a cautious literal-mindedness.

Samuel Adamson's version of All About My Mother is an interesting case. It summons up Almodovar's grieving, gaudy creatures: the bereaved mother, the transvestite prostitute, the nun who's not only pregnant but HIV-positive, the grande dame actress and her junkie girlfriend, all making themselves up as they go along. Tom Cairns's production is subtly faithful to the movie's preoccupations with acting and pretending: Hildegard Bechtler's design glides from one small stage to another - a sitting room, a dressing room, a hospital seminar space, surrounded by its own audience. It has in Diana Rigg (playing the grande dame) an actor who plays with her starriness: she can cause a stir simply by mildly inflecting her Damehood, so that when the words 'sucked a cock' fall from her lips, the stalls erupt.

And yet. Despite all this, and despite an exquisitely flurried Eleanor Bron (the nun's mother) and gorgeously defiant Mark Gatiss, from the League of Gentlemen - who plays the trannie in a real Welsh accent, fake Chanel suit and clownlike slide between tragedy and daftness - this is a mild version of the movie, not a re-creation. The pace - to do not only with speed of action but with emotional volatility - has dropped. A domestication has taken place, along with a baffling Anglicisation (how does Joanne Froggatt's squawking Sister Rosa fit in to a convent, whether in Spain or Britain?). One of the most disruptive features of Almodovar's film was that it showed women living outside not just their own but any home: they are out on the streets. That's lost here. As the bereaved mother, Lesley Manville is always riveting: she unfolds as slowly as a Japanese flower - but she is so millpond-still that her despair doesn't drive the action.

The perceived staidness of Chichester provokes actors into defiance. Five years ago, Corin Redgrave sang the 'Internationale' on its stage, then looked into the stalls, to tease: 'I can see you're longing to join in.' Now Mark Rylance has gone a step further, and given the audience its Spartacus moment. At the end of I Am Shakespeare, he gets spectators on their feet, fists clenched, arms in the air, each declaring 'I am Shakespeare'.

Rylance is unbeatable at sending a direct current from stage to stalls, at making the abstruse seem immediate. He is also the most mercurial of our great actors. Playing the obsessive host of an internet chatroom dedicated to proving Shakespeare wasn't the author of the works we call his, he is brilliantly, comically geeky: he's a blinky ex-schoolmaster, given to jazzy yelps and would-be hip gestures. He's also sending himself up: at Shakespeare's Globe he was a famous Shakespearean doubter.

The production - by Rylance and Matthew Warchus - goes wonky in the middle, when, with ghostly pretenders to the Shakespearean title flooding the stage, what started as satire gets bogged down in exegesis. It hardly matters. With the considerable help of Sean Foley, who puts in an arresting, gangling performance as a one-time pop-star turned hippy philosopher, this is a daring show which is, even when ramshackle, always alive, never derivative. That populist Spartacus moment isn't trivial: it makes a point about the protean nature of Shakespeare.

When Jonathan Kent and Ian McDiarmid were running the Almeida, the productions were famous for their extraordinary velocity. They reinvented by acceleration: Chekhov looked like a different playwright when performed at breakneck speed. That's changed under the artistic directorship of Michael Attenborough. Deliberation is his watchword. Sometimes plod. As in his production of Awake and Sing! Clifford Odets' play is a sturdy piece of Thirties socialism: a naturalistic picture of a Jewish family in the Bronx, threatened by the Depression, and reacting variously - by suicide, flight, romance, despotism, revolutionary leanings. It has the historical interest of an old snapshot; it has the theatrical interest of paving the way for the social inquisitions of Arthur Miller. But it needs a far sparkier production if it's to deliver dramatic surprise along with political piety. As it is, there's washing hanging over the action, Caruso songs about blossom-filled utopia in the air and a fat capitalist filling his face at the table.

Ben Turner is impressive as the thwarted son; Stockard Channing - the puller of the evening - is both too stunning and too stunned for the bitter matriarch. Most of the cast look more confused by the play's creakiness than distressed by its subject matter: when one of their number tips off the roof it bothers them only for a couple of ticks. There's enough to awake you here, but nothing to sing about.